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GitHub vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

  1. GitHub is a code hosting platform while Visual Studio Code is a code editor: GitHub allows developers to store and manage their code repositories in the cloud, providing version control and collaborative features, whereas Visual Studio Code is a text editor with built-in features for coding and debugging.
  2. GitHub is web-based while Visual Studio Code is a desktop application: GitHub can be accessed through a web browser, allowing users to work with their code from any device with an internet connection, while Visual Studio Code is installed locally on a user's computer.
  3. GitHub focuses on collaboration and code sharing while Visual Studio Code focuses on individual development: GitHub provides tools for version control, issue tracking, and collaborative features such as pull requests, making it ideal for teams working together on projects. In contrast, Visual Studio Code is primarily tailored for individual developers to write, debug, and test their code.
  4. GitHub supports multiple programming languages and integrations while Visual Studio Code is more language and platform agnostic: GitHub can be used for hosting projects written in various programming languages and offers integrations with other development tools, whereas Visual Studio Code has a wider range of support for programming languages and platforms out of the box.
  5. GitHub has extensive social features such as following, starring, and forking repositories while Visual Studio Code has limited social features: GitHub allows users to follow other developers, star repositories to show appreciation or bookmark them for later reference, and fork repositories to create their own copies for experimentation. Visual Studio Code lacks these social features and focuses more on the development environment.
  6. GitHub provides continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) capabilities while Visual Studio Code does not natively offer CI/CD: GitHub has built-in workflows and actions that allow for automated testing and deployment as part of the software development process. In contrast, Visual Studio Code is a code editor and does not have built-in CI/CD capabilities.

In summary, GitHub is a web-based code hosting platform focused on collaboration and code sharing, while Visual Studio Code is a desktop code editor designed for individual development. GitHub supports multiple languages and offers extensive social features, while Visual Studio Code is more language and platform agnostic and lacks extensive social features. Additionally, GitHub provides CI/CD capabilities, which Visual Studio Code does not offer natively.

Decisions about GitHub and Visual Studio Code
Weverton Timoteo

Do you review your Pull/Merge Request before assigning Reviewers?

If you work in a team opening a Pull Request (or Merge Request) looks appropriate. However, have you ever thought about opening a Pull/Merge Request when working by yourself? Here's a checklist of things you can review in your own:

  • Pick the correct target branch
  • Make Drafts explicit
  • Name things properly
  • Ask help for tools
  • Remove the noise
  • Fetch necessary data
  • Understand Mergeability
  • Pass the message
  • Add screenshots
  • Be found in the future
  • Comment inline in your changes

Read the blog post for more detailed explanation for each item :D

What else do you review before asking for code review?

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Weverton Timoteo

Using an inclusive language is crucial for fostering a diverse culture. Git has changed the naming conventions to be more language-inclusive, and so you should change. Our development tools, like GitHub and GitLab, already supports the change.

SourceLevel deals very nicely with repositories that changed the master branch to a more appropriate word. Besides, you can use the grep linter the look for exclusive terms contained in the source code.

As the inclusive language gap may happen in other aspects of our lives, have you already thought about them?

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Weverton Timoteo

One of the magic tricks git performs is the ability to rewrite log history. You can do it in many ways, but git rebase -i is the one I most use. With this command, It’s possible to switch commits order, remove a commit, squash two or more commits, or edit, for instance.

It’s particularly useful to run it before opening a pull request. It allows developers to “clean up” the mess and organize commits before submitting to review. If you follow the practice 3 and 4, then the list of commits should look very similar to a task list. It should reveal the rationale you had, telling the story of how you end up with that final code.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 12 upvotes · 1.4M views

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 8 upvotes · 734.7K views

Out of most of the VCS solutions out there, we found Gitlab was the most feature complete with a free community edition. Their DevSecops offering is also a very robust solution. Gitlab CI/CD was quite easy to setup and the direct integration with your VCS + CI/CD is also a bonus. Out of the box integration with major cloud providers, alerting through instant messages etc. are all extremely convenient. We push our CI/CD updates to MS Teams.

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Gitlab as A LOT of features that GitHub and Azure DevOps are missing. Even if both GH and Azure are backed by Microsoft, GitLab being open source has a faster upgrade rate and the hosted by gitlab.com solution seems more appealing than anything else! Quick win: the UI is way better and the Pipeline is way easier to setup on GitLab!

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(1/2) In terms of DevOps we chose GitHub, Git, Visual Studio Code, Sentry, Yarn, CircleCI.

  • GitHub was chosen because of its features such as GitHub Projects, GitHub Issues, and GitHub Milestones, which are normally separate tools such as Trello for issue tracking, but come as part a package with GitHub. This choice is also influenced by our decision for using Git for version control.

  • Git was chosen as our version control because of the wide popularity, familiarity in our team, and rich list of tools that support integrations. A tool such as Perforce does not suit our needs because we do not require the mapping features important to huge code bases and the lack of many popular integrations is not appealing.

  • Visual Studio Code was chosen as our primary source-code editor for an array of reasons. VS code works well with our chosen version control system since it comes with embedded Git control out of the box. For every language or framework that we are working in, there are multiple extensions to improve our team's productivity and efficiency. It also has live collaboration through their LiveShare feature and more, all while maintaining itself as a lightweight tool.

  • Sentry, Yarn, andCircleCI in part 2.

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We're using GitHub for version control as it's an industry standard for version control and our team has plenty of experience using it. We also found many features such as issues and project help us organize. We also really liked the fact that it has the Actions CI platform built in because it allows us to keep more of our development in one place. We chose Slack as our main communication platform because it allows us to organize our communication streams into various channels for specific topics. Additionally, we really liked the integrations as they allow us to keep a lot of our in formation in one place rather than spread around many different apps.

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YUVRENDER GILL

We will use the ubiquitous combination of Git for version control and GitHub for code hosting. They have all the functionality we require for this project and will fit perfectly into our development workflow with up to three developers working simultaneously on the codebase. We also plan on using GitHub Actions to set up our CI/CD workflows.

VS Code will be our primary code editor due to its combination of developer-friendly features, including a large extensions library, IntelliSense code completion, Git integration, and powerful debugging tools. Furthermore, it offers better performance and more simplicity than full-fledged IDEs while supporting a multitude of languages.

Selenium will be used to perform automated testing of our web application. It supports all major web browsers and operating systems and supports test scripts to be written in multiple languages, including Python which we are also planning to use for our back-end, helping us to consolidate the languages required for our project. In addition, Selenium is free and has support for most CI/CD tools.

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Simon Ibssa
Student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo · | 2 upvotes · 1.3M views

I decided to choose VSCode over Sublime text for my Systems Programming class in C. What I love about VSCode is its awesome ability to add extensions. Intellisense is a beautiful debugger, and Remote SSH allows me to login and make real-time changes in VSCode to files on my university server. This is an awesome alternative to going back and forth on pushing/pulling code and logging into servers in the terminal. Great choice for anyone interested in C programming!

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Pros of GitHub
Pros of Visual Studio Code
  • 1.8K
    Open source friendly
  • 1.5K
    Easy source control
  • 1.3K
    Nice UI
  • 1.1K
    Great for team collaboration
  • 868
    Easy setup
  • 504
    Issue tracker
  • 488
    Great community
  • 483
    Remote team collaboration
  • 449
    Great way to share
  • 442
    Pull request and features planning
  • 147
    Just works
  • 132
    Integrated in many tools
  • 122
    Free Public Repos
  • 116
    Github Gists
  • 114
    Github pages
  • 83
    Easy to find repos
  • 62
    Open source
  • 60
    Easy to find projects
  • 60
    It's free
  • 56
    Network effect
  • 49
    Extensive API
  • 43
    Organizations
  • 42
    Branching
  • 34
    Developer Profiles
  • 32
    Git Powered Wikis
  • 30
    Great for collaboration
  • 24
    It's fun
  • 23
    Clean interface and good integrations
  • 22
    Community SDK involvement
  • 20
    Learn from others source code
  • 16
    Because: Git
  • 14
    It integrates directly with Azure
  • 10
    Standard in Open Source collab
  • 10
    Newsfeed
  • 8
    Fast
  • 8
    Beautiful user experience
  • 8
    It integrates directly with Hipchat
  • 7
    Easy to discover new code libraries
  • 6
    It's awesome
  • 6
    Smooth integration
  • 6
    Cloud SCM
  • 6
    Nice API
  • 6
    Graphs
  • 6
    Integrations
  • 5
    Hands down best online Git service available
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 5
    Quick Onboarding
  • 5
    CI Integration
  • 5
    Remarkable uptime
  • 4
    Security options
  • 4
    Loved by developers
  • 4
    Uses GIT
  • 4
    Free HTML hosting
  • 4
    Easy to use and collaborate with others
  • 4
    Version Control
  • 4
    Simple but powerful
  • 4
    Unlimited Public Repos at no cost
  • 3
    Nice to use
  • 3
    IAM
  • 3
    Ci
  • 3
    Easy deployment via SSH
  • 2
    Free private repos
  • 2
    Good tools support
  • 2
    All in one development service
  • 2
    Never dethroned
  • 2
    Easy source control and everything is backed up
  • 2
    Issues tracker
  • 2
    Self Hosted
  • 2
    IAM integration
  • 2
    Very Easy to Use
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Leads the copycats
  • 2
    Free HTML hostings
  • 2
    Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects
  • 2
    Beautiful
  • 1
    Dasf
  • 1
    Profound
  • 340
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 309
    Fast
  • 193
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
  • 126
    Git integration
  • 106
    Intellisense
  • 78
    Faster than Atom
  • 53
    Better ui, easy plugins, and nice git integration
  • 45
    Great Refactoring Tools
  • 44
    Good Plugins
  • 42
    Terminal
  • 38
    Superb markdown support
  • 36
    Open Source
  • 35
    Extensions
  • 26
    Awesome UI
  • 26
    Large & up-to-date extension community
  • 24
    Powerful and fast
  • 22
    Portable
  • 18
    Best code editor
  • 18
    Best editor
  • 17
    Easy to get started with
  • 15
    Lots of extensions
  • 15
    Good for begginers
  • 15
    Crossplatform
  • 15
    Built on Electron
  • 14
    Extensions for everything
  • 14
    Open, cross-platform, fast, monthly updates
  • 14
    All Languages Support
  • 13
    Easy to use and learn
  • 12
    "fast, stable & easy to use"
  • 12
    Extensible
  • 11
    Ui design is great
  • 11
    Totally customizable
  • 11
    Git out of the box
  • 11
    Useful for begginer
  • 11
    Faster edit for slow computer
  • 10
    SSH support
  • 10
    Great community
  • 10
    Fast Startup
  • 9
    Works With Almost EveryThing You Need
  • 9
    Great language support
  • 9
    Powerful Debugger
  • 9
    It has terminal and there are lots of shortcuts in it
  • 8
    Can compile and run .py files
  • 8
    Python extension is fast
  • 7
    Features rich
  • 7
    Great document formater
  • 6
    He is not Michael
  • 6
    Extension Echosystem
  • 6
    She is not Rachel
  • 6
    Awesome multi cursor support
  • 5
    VSCode.pro Course makes it easy to learn
  • 5
    Language server client
  • 5
    SFTP Workspace
  • 5
    Very proffesional
  • 5
    Easy azure
  • 4
    Has better support and more extentions for debugging
  • 4
    Supports lots of operating systems
  • 4
    Excellent as git difftool and mergetool
  • 4
    Virtualenv integration
  • 3
    Better autocompletes than Atom
  • 3
    Has more than enough languages for any developer
  • 3
    'batteries included'
  • 3
    More tools to integrate with vs
  • 3
    Emmet preinstalled
  • 2
    VS Code Server: Browser version of VS Code
  • 2
    CMake support with autocomplete
  • 2
    Microsoft
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 2
    Light
  • 2
    Big extension marketplace
  • 2
    Fast and ruby is built right in
  • 1
    File:///C:/Users/ydemi/Downloads/yuksel_demirkaya_webpa

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Cons of GitHub
Cons of Visual Studio Code
  • 56
    Owned by micrcosoft
  • 38
    Expensive for lone developers that want private repos
  • 15
    Relatively slow product/feature release cadence
  • 10
    API scoping could be better
  • 9
    Only 3 collaborators for private repos
  • 4
    Limited featureset for issue management
  • 3
    Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens
  • 2
    GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions
  • 1
    Expensive
  • 1
    No multilingual interface
  • 1
    Horrible review comments tracking (absence)
  • 1
    Takes a long time to commit
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 13
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools
  • 10
    Poor autocomplete
  • 8
    Super Slow
  • 8
    Huge cpu usage with few installed extension
  • 8
    Microsoft sends telemetry data
  • 7
    Poor in PHP
  • 6
    It's MicroSoft
  • 3
    Poor in Python
  • 3
    No Built in Browser Preview
  • 3
    No color Intergrator
  • 3
    Very basic for java development and buggy at times
  • 3
    No built in live Preview
  • 3
    Electron
  • 2
    Bad Plugin Architecture
  • 2
    Powered by Electron
  • 1
    Terminal does not identify path vars sometimes
  • 1
    Slow C++ Language Server

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is GitHub?

GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.

What is Visual Studio Code?

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

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What companies use GitHub?
What companies use Visual Studio Code?
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What are some alternatives to GitHub and Visual Studio Code?
GitLab
GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.
Bitbucket
Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.
AWS CodeCommit
CodeCommit eliminates the need to operate your own source control system or worry about scaling its infrastructure. You can use CodeCommit to securely store anything from source code to binaries, and it works seamlessly with your existing Git tools.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
SVN (Subversion)
Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.
See all alternatives